November 2019

The Idiot (No, not that one)

November 20, 2019

Book Choice for June 2019, by Elif Batuman

Look at me, wheeeee, third post in a month, I’m really going for it! That said, I do have a lot to catch up on. Finally bringing Night and Day to an end meant that I could return to a book that I left off at the halfway point, in the end of September. See, I’m reading all the time. Just never consistently, and often several things at one time. Well, without this 12 Books a Year thing, I’m not sure I would be reading at all. It’s good to push yourself.

So no, this isn’t the Dostoyevsky book. Just imagine my boyfriend’s delighted face when he thought that it was! But it wasn’t. Still, it was very close (I believe) to having won the Pulitzer prize, which I am dimly aware of as being “very important,”and I heard about it from Booktube. I’m really glad, in general, about this choice. It is a book about language. It’s kind of about love, obsessions, those intense relationships that go nowhere, but it’s really about words and their meanings. There are about 5,000 anecdotes regarding misconceptions over what words mean crammed into this book, and some are laugh-out-loud funny, but I realized near the end, that in the second section, set in Hungary, new characters were barely described at all; we learn everything about them through their oddly pointed (to our ears) usages of English.

That’s neither good nor bad, and it is very much how the first-person narrator looks at the world. She just kind of rubs along, being alive, listening to what people say. In this way, I felt we were different, I used to care a LOT about what people said, and I believed that I could quote people exactly, especially when their words hit the ear in an unusual way, but I am not so much like that now. Either I have heard all the possible sentences which have ever been created (at the ripe age of 34) or I became myself more productive than receptive. I think about my own thoughts more now. I understand (shades of Night and Day!) how so many of our utterances are just—not worth remembering. The person who said a thing, probably actually didn’t mean it that way (as our mothers tell us when we are four). But seriously, how often do you iron out your word order and consciously pick your tone before you speak in your first language? The main character is always looking for how people betray their inner truths with their verbal emissions—and I don’t believe in that anymore, anymore than I would look to a drunk person for truth. But maybe this novel is intensely good in this way: it portrays how youth thinks.

Hmm. When I sat down to write up my thoughts on this book, finished last night, I thought I would have little to say, even though I liked it, even though I might buy a paper copy (I kindle-apped this one too) and read it again, and keep it—being a big believer in the fact that you don’t know a book until you read it twice, and a bigger believer in only keeping the BEST books— but I am not quite sure. Yes, this book is a book very much about language, and could be kept in my little collection of linguistic and philological oddities (I’m getting closer and closer to my true niche of weirdness!) but I’m not sure if the love story is worth going through again.

I mean, it’s very TRUE, despite dating to that 2 year time span in like 1998 when it was exciting to receive emails, although it’s difficult to believe that ever happened (I remember that time! Sigh.) The Idiot is about hanging out and wasting time with someone you think is way above you (the type whose aloofness is the only thing that makes them interesting) and never bringing it into the physical, despite all their chatting about literature.

Everyone has a first love story in them, so passionate and desperate, that would not, being recorded on paper, actually be able to move other people. You have to experience these things yourself, by yourself. You will read this book, enjoying all the cleverness (Harvard! multi-lingualism!) hugely, and then you will remember that there was also a “love story” in there too, and go “Aww, she was so young.” * It makes sense that she acted The Idiot.

Hopefully something like this can’t happen to you twice, although I do know that it can. And your heart can break in all sorts of ways–it doesn’t need to be over a person. It can be over your unwillingness to move beyond your fears. It can break from socio-economic inequality or the shocking tragedies that happen in life. Love isn’t all there is to write about, but this is an incredibly well-told story of First Love in the late nineties.

After I finished this book, I just kept reading on my kindle app, something that I had bought before, by chance another new book also set in the late nineties, which appropriately provided me with a quotation that almost literally stabbed my heart—(it’s true! It’s true! As the blade flashed!)

“Education is directly proportional to anxiety”

This is from “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” probably not a book I will review on here, if I ever were to finish it. This quote however, pretty much sums up my existence, and could have been cut from “The Idiot”–although The Idiot’s narrator is very self-contained and calm, with a superhuman ability to not need to discuss her love uncertainties with her friends (because this is fiction). But Education is Directly Proportional to Anxiety should have been used to caption an image, or as the watermark of the paper. It’s a hard-hitting sentence, for sure.

*Am I the only one feeling forty million years old right now? This feeling has been growing on me for the past three weeks or so.

Night and Day

November 18, 2019

Book Choice for April 2019, by Virginia Woolf

This book review was 8 months in the making, because that’s how long it took me to read these dense 385 pages, while putting it down for weeks at a time. By now you might assume that is my normal way of reading, but really it is related to the crammed-emotionality of this particular book. Reading cam be hard, as I will get into later in this discussion. This discussion will be told in 2 parts, with the first part written after I read the actual text and the second part after I went back and read the introduction, looking for signposts.

Before page 200, I didn’t care about any character in this book, and I mean, at all. Shortly after page 200, Mary Dachet goes home for the weekend and I started to actually give a crap. It may be that the first 200 pages very much are engaged with setting up the world, a mostly unconscious rich person’s London. About 100 pages after I started to care at all about what the characters said to each other—interestingly, in a very “realistic” way it doesn’t matter what the characters  actually said to each other, because as in life, their utterances were hopelessly mundane and didn’t match up at all with the motives behind them, which the reader was privy to, for the most part.

At about page 300, I began to dimly realize that the characters actually were in love with each other, before that it was told, but I was not convinced. In a way, this book expresses very much the garbled intellectualizing the brain dies when it tries to think about its feelings, this is done very often, characters following their trains of thought…Which I think it’s very brave and high-level writing, but that doesn’t mean it is compelling. And still– you would have to be the most romantic reader enamoured of romantic fiction to care about the consequences of these people’s love for each other. It’s not that it doesn’t work—for all I know it might be the first stream of consciousness novel ever—and I do think it must have been QUITE a different novel , perhaps radical, in 1919— it’s just, hard going.

You will read 12 pages with supreme effort, and then set it down for a week or so, if you go faster you’re a better Mensch than me. The last 80 pages I managed to accomplish in about 5 days, this was mainly possible because I did not want to DNF it, I did not want to choose a new book for April, also it’s part of my “Read all of Virginia Woolf Project” which I have imposed on myself for no clear reason, other than the fact I am a woman (makes sense?) And I was somewhat motivated by this 12 books a year project overall. With this done, I can finally move forward. I started this book on a grey spring day when we lived in our old apartment. Perhaps I use books to mark time. I thought—as this book was coming to a close—maybe I really like this! Maybe I will find that this book is great—(I do think it is “great” as an accomplishment) and that I will want to read it again someday. As no one really learned anything though, that they weren’t capable of before the story started, I am not inclined to read it again, however. It will go on the shelf beside The Voyage Out, V. Woolf’s first novel, waiting until my reading of her other works makes these first two more clear…

Now I’m moving on to read the Introduction, which in my Wordsworth Copy is by “Dorinda Guest PhD.” It showed me my own predilection for non-fiction reading (which I haven’t given into at all this year—I do attempt to read hard NF everyday after all)–but there were times during this book I wished I could just read the damn introduction and figure out what I was supposed to be learning here. So now I will read what dear Dorinda says, and hope it gives me a frame, a map, a path…

It didn’t really. Apparently Wordsworth introductions are to “guide, not interpret” for the reader. There are certain things it brought out to me, such as the “self-conciousness” of Mary Dachet, who is trying to create a profession for herself, of working for increased women’s rights, when that was never a vocation before and certainly isn’t paid…I know this “self-consciousness” well myself. There is very subtle exploration in this book on what it would be to do work that represented us, that we “loved” or believed in, and especially as this is discussed for the women, Katharine and Mary, (men’s work is of course a solid, accepted thing that requires no justification), which is very interesting. The Introducton points out that Katharine’s profession was “living at home”–which of course sounds rather stupid, but which entailed a myriad of stupid activities and supporting roles and an entire way of being (that obscures most women’s personalities, if they were even allowed to have them) and was actually a full-time job.

Finally, the Introduction reminded me that the saving grace of this book is really the figure of Katharine’s mother—she was the only comedy I saw in the book (aside from the awkwardness of humans speaking to each other, or maybe the patheticness of Katharine’s suitor Rodney, though I thought he was more of a tragedy myself), and she was fantastic. Perpetually enthused about something, absolutely ludicrous in her cries after “Poetry! Poetry!” and her ridiculous quotations. It’s not often that a female character would get such a role, not having to be instructive or ideal, just a kind of exuberant person who has to be worked around—a nutty professor, but a woman. That’s very rare. Women always have to be perfect, and serve a POINT. Or they aren’t there.

All in all, Night and Day, you mystify me. I know you are getting at something, with all the energy of a placid stream rubbing a pebble smooth. It was not fiery enough for me, all the feelings were hidden under successive overcoats of Englishness—but I know you were important. But I don’t think you were romantic and most of the time I was incredibly bored.

I’ve heard various accounts of Jacob’s Room, from booktubers (although I cannot remember exactly who). Someone really enjoyed it’s artistry, and another felt she had suffered too long, for no reward. Well, that’s next year’s April to look forward too!

A Clergyman’s Daughter

November 4, 2019

Book Choice for July 2019, by Orson Welles

At some point during the last six months I rather made up my mind that I was only going to read “weird” books for this blog, and by that I meant that I was going to search out fairly uncommon books, forgotten classics in the main. Or books by famous authors that are NOT the works ever associated with these great names now. This perversity lead me to read, at the tail end of July, A Clergyman’s Daughter, the first novel published by a certain Orson Welles.
Let me set the scene for you: I am back home from the conference, with a sense of an ending. The weather is fair and cool. We are in the process of moving out of our flat, all our stuff, as well as my boyfriend, are already gone to the new place, because he had to start his new job. I’m confused about what next to do in my PhD project, and staring down the barrel of weeks of working just for the institute and not for myself.

I had some clothes hanging in the wardrobe and a few books, and silence, in which to consider the mainly empty room which I moved into when I came to Germany and started a new life. What a different person that was, running from her pain. In other ways, I am the same. I laud her courage though, I’m so glad she changed her life, the scared angry thing. Now she has everything she has ever wanted—and the most obliging work.
At the time I read this book, I didn’t know how much longer I would be in that room, with my lingering past self and still air. The time had to be gotten through somehow. I opened a book that I also had gotten at the Oxfam charity shop on the Cowley Road the last time I was in town. I had tried dipping into it twice before, and was only on page 11 when I sat down that quiet Sunday–the flat was hardly ever empty or quiet–in my old chair we got from the street, like nearly everything we own, and began to read. I’m sure I got up for tea and water and to go to the bathroom, but I did nothing else and I read the book straight through. It’s not long, but when does that happen in life? I told my friend that I sat and read a book straight through and she was like “No!” But Readers, it’s true. And a leisured moment worth recording.
A Clergyman’s Daughter is the story of a girl whose work and untiring dedication is taken for granted, who has a bit of a mental-breakdown episode and runs away from home. I remember feeling intense worry from the creepiness of a male character in the story, but damn was he charming and grew on me, although he REALLY shouldn’t have. I was struck by how well Orson Welles wrote a female character–I am VERY picky on this subject as we are usually cast as dolls to be moved around for reasons entirely unconnected to our hazy, undefined inner beings. He did well. I liked this girl and I felt for her. I cared what happened to her and believe she was a person, although the book seems deceptively simple, it actually is quite literary, if literary means that she made a decision at the end which I STILL wonder about. Because it’s not made clear, or wrapped up with a moral, as you would rather expect from the type of plot it is or the way it is written.
All in all, I was glad to have read it, but it may have contributed to curing me from the desire to find forgotten things just to make a point of it.  I mean, Orson Welles wrote about twenty novels I think, before hitting it out of the park with Animal Farm (I still can’t remember if I read it in High School or just had the choice to read and think I have read it because it’s such a part of our Zeitgeist now);  but the fact remains that I’m not exactly running to chase his other works down.
I’m glad I’m cured of needing to read things that are never read now—sometimes there’s a reason, although not necessarily, in the case if this book. Now I am again free to better connect with what my taste actually is. Still, I’m glad I read this because of the experience of utter absorption I had in my old room that day, and because, let’s face it, I’m not doing great on my book-a-month plan. I remain stalled in April in my Mandatory Virginia Woolf book, and I am throwing Villette (June) in the trash where it belongs. I needed a win.

What is interesting to me mainly about this book is the setting, the “shabby-genteel” in-between world of the clergy, which by the beginning of the 20th centre was on the course of dying a slow death. And yet it wasn’t always so, of course! This year I tried to read the Warden, in order to climb into the Barsetshire Chronicles, but I found it to be impossibly boring, deathly even on audibook, and so I have settled on watching the miniseries made out of all seven books, available on youtube thank goodness. A Warden, was a type of churchman who raked in 800 pounds (in the 1870s) a year for basically doing what he liked, perhaps giving one sermon a week (it isn’t clear to me if the Warden of the novel was actually obliged to preach) and for saying a few kind words to old men living in a rest-home, whenever he met them. I checked and 800 pounds in 1880 when the book was published would be over 100,000  euros a year now. Sounds great.

This cause me to remember Bill Bryson’s description in his book At Home of the strange flowering of the Anglican priestly class in England, which led to a large number of well-educated men who didn’t have to work, (or hardly at all, think about the expectations Edward in Mansfield Park entertains, in all seriousness he vows to take his future ministerial duties seriously, he vows always to preach his own sermons). These were hardly onerous posts. It’s not surprising the public got tired of this, as skepticism grew. But in their heyday, Clergymen were freed to write, invent things, raise large families or think about their dinner all day–whatever they felt like. It’s a weird situation, and the church was obsfucatingly complex, with a hierarchy of curates, wardens, elders, almoners, etc (I don’t really know, I’m just saying words) and now, in whst is probanly a good thing, or just a sign of the times, this system has mostly rotted away.

But you meet the branches and twigs of this system scattered through literature, the such as the titular Daughter of this book (set in about 1920), and the children of a clergymen in Virginia Woolf’s novel Night and Day (set in about 1915); all of these are offshoots of quasi-upper middle class clerical families with rambling old houses that their dads’ got for free, and a difficult to define social status which required the boys to go through Oxford or Cambridge and often allowed the girls of such families an education. I suppose all traces of this shabby-genteel world, which was fading from about the time of The Warden through the 1920s-30s died during the Second World War. I don’t want to know about the system itself necessarily, but I would like to see if there are any books about the best outcomes of this obsolete caste, the books, and inventions—I reserve judgement on The Diary of a Country Parson, that tale of gluttony— as to whether it will embody the best side effects of the system, or evidence of its worst waste. Curious.